Thursday, December 3, 2015

I'll bet you thought I was done here, hey? No, just very busy this last year.
This seems like a sufficiently significant bit of news to warrant a quick mention though.WDC's shingle-free stocking filler: A 10TB helium disk drive
The spec' is pretty amazing and available in PDF format Here.
Here's a quick rundown -Western Digital Corporation (WDC) has updated its Ultrastar He8 to the He10, providing the same capacity as the shingled HGST Ultrastar Archive Ha10 announced in June but without the shingling, meaning standard write speeds.Compared to the He8 it has 25 per cent
more capacity, and WDC says it has a 56 per cent lower watts/TB rating
than traditional air-filled HDDs, a 2.5 million hours
MTBF (mean-time-between-failures) rating, and a five-year warranty.The drive has a second-generation, dual-stage HGST
Micro-Actuator to enhance tracking accuracy and reliability in
multi-disk enclosures. It is said to be "drop-in ready for all
mainstream enterprise capacity applications." This presumably, partly at
least, explains why WDC can now get to the 10TB capacity level without
having to shingle (partially overlap) tracks and incur the penalty of
slower rewrite speeds.It rotates at 7,200rpm and is a classic
capacity-optimized drive, with a 256MB cache and 249MB/sec sustained
transfer rate. The previous He8 had a 205MB/sec sustained transfer rate. It can have a 6Gbit/s SATA interface or a 12Gbit/s SAS one.There are Instant Secure Erase (ISE) and
Self-Encrypting Drive (SED) options and the disk is built for 24 x 7
operation. To increase reliability, it retains a previous firmware
version for safer firmware updates.

I think that Santa could probably fit that in his sack without any problem.

Tuesday, April 8, 2014

Most of my machines have 1TB drives and 2TB external backup drives.
I was thinking about moving to multiple Virtual Machines running on the desktop PC with a 4TB drive to hold the VMs and another for backups.
This means losing having the SSD as Windows 7 boot drive unless I get a bigger SSD for Windows 7 and the Hypervisor and keep Linux machines on a HDD.
Still, as of today I know what the server needs for VM backups - Seagate brings out 6TB HDD
Get a datasheet here (PDF).